


Return of the Queen

by rainbowagnes



Series: Aglaeca [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Epic Speeches, F/M, Politics and Diplomacy, archer and knight cassian, royalty jyn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 08:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11227503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainbowagnes/pseuds/rainbowagnes
Summary: Jyn Erso, long lost heir to the throne of Laemu, finds an army and an unexpected ally in a man she thought had abandoned her.





	Return of the Queen

**Author's Note:**

> There's something about That Scene (Hey Jyn, to make this up to you I'm gonna BRING YOU AN ARMY) that seemed so very, very medieval to me. I ended up doing a vague fantasy!AU mainly so I didn't have to bother with historical accuracy, and also to best represent Cassian. 
> 
> Roughly speaking, I'm kinda picturing the Empire to be Holy Roman Empire-ish. Laemu is medieval Denmark, and Festia is kind of an Al-Andalus/Tenochtitlan mash-up in a larger empire.

She was never good at this. 

At the fighting, yes. At running, even better. And at strategy, she understood a battle in a way that had made Saul Gureya proud. 

But politics? Politics she doesn't understand. The delicate game of alliances, marriages, blood and kinship and thrones- she's never had the luxury of involvement within the complicated webs of power that form The Alliance. Ever since the Empire invaded Laemu and forced her on the run, her life has been about survival and ignoring the red imperial heralds that hand from ever castle on the continent. 

Mothma shakes her head. "I extend my greatest condolences to your family, Lady Erso. But we cannot move our forces into outright battle against the Empire. It would be politically disastrous to many members of the Alliance."

There's a kind of sorrowful half-smile in Mothma's words that confirms one of Jyn's suspicions about the woman- that what she personally believes might run counter to what she says in her role as peace-weaver for the Alliance. 

"As such, the Alliance will continue to employ forms of political resistance in the form of treaties, direct diplomatic action, and trade sanctions. But we will not engage." 

The assembled- diplomats, ambassadors, minor nobles- nod their assent.

Jyn does not. 

"With respect, Mon Mothma, we can't do this." 

"Yes, we ca-" Draven, tries to speak, but the tall, brown-skinned man with the billowing cloak (Organa, Jyn remembers, Leia's father, reigning head of House Organa) puts up a hand to stop him. 

"Let her speak, general. I have learned from my wife and from my daughter the value of having the opinions of many women."

Draven nodes his assent, and suddenly fear courses through Jyn, the anxious feeling of having one's blood replaced by ice water. She hasn't had any sort of training in things like this, in making people listen to her. Most of her life she's gotten by by having people not notice her at all. But now? Now she has to convince them not only of her country's worth, but of her worth, and she isn't even she of that herself. 

So instead she takes a deep breath and tries to appear regal. Poised and elegant. She's wearing a clean tunic, though, had her hair combed, but she still barely seems different than the thief and soldier of fortune she was but months ago. 

No- she's changed. She's seen her father die in Krennic captivity. She's seen the horrors the Empire has committed and the tolls they have taken, and she has sworn she will live to see their end. Uphold Goreya's legacy. Save the dream. 

So she breathes in. Out. And speaks.

"We have our forces assembled today, and the Empire has no idea where we are or why we are coming. If we were to combine our calvalry and our longships, bring our forces out on the beaches of Skarif- Laemu is our for the taking! And we could cut off the Empire's travel through the North Sea, divide their territory into halves that would be infinitely easier for rebel forces to liberate. It would be a decisive victory against the Empire, and lord knows you rebels need one of those." 

"And it would be an act of political sabotage!" A ginger with a drooping mustache cuts in. " My king would not be able to sell my herring or barley to the Empire, and you would lose his support in this Alliance."

His loss, Jyn wants to scream. Who cares if some minor dimwit can't make some gold off of a tyrant? But she maintains her cool fire. 

Gods above, Lyra better be proud of her. 

"Don't you understand? We are beyond the point of politics, or some kind of solution you can draft with treaties! You've been too afraid to do anything! Saul Goreya did everything to buy you more time, and you've done nothing but shit it away. The partisans gave you a hope of victory, and now you've got to take that hope and make it worth something!" 

"So you are suggesting we risk everything on hope?" Draven sounds even more aggravated then he did before. 

"Rebellions are built on hope," she says, and it's a call back to a day months ago, to a sweaty, dusty afternoon in a Jedhan medina with the man she thought she could trust. The man who has now disappeared when she needs him most. (But then again, why should she be surprised? Everyone leaves her.) 

"Lady Erso, the council must respectfully decline. While the strategic importance of Laemu would be a boon to the Alliance, there is the aftermath to think of. If Laemu were to be liberated by the Alliance, it would create a power vacuum over who was to rule it. Currently, with Galen Erso dead, there is no male heir to the throne."

"I was always my father's heir." Her parents had agreed on that, and her father had even let her wear his crown sometimes, in joking preparations for what was to come. She was an only child, a rare thing, but she knew that her birth had almost killed her mother and that she was her parent's treasure just as if she had been a son. 

"Are you suggesting that we follow this girl into battle?" Some genius in the back pipes up, and already she can feel the room tensing, rising in irritation. Jyn understands Mothma's point. She is only half a Laemuan anyway- not a legitimate claim to the throne under anyone's standards. If the Alliance were to liberate the nation, then every one of these power hungry small kings would set their eyes on it, in a time when the Alliance's only saving grace is unity. 

Mothma looks in her eyes then, and there's a kinship. The lost queen and the peace-weaver. In a different world Mothma they would be equals, leading armies to tear the Imperial banner down. In this one though, they are women, subject to the most bitter of paradoxes that while women may decide the fates of nations, they will also not be recognized as leaders due to the most archaic of traditions. 

"The Council is adjourned," Mothma states, and it is.

\------- 

After the meeting, she pours herself a generous mug of the strongest ale she can find and walks to the very edge of the Alliance's camp. The evening light is golden and lights the mist-drenched mores afire. 

It's been so long since she was here, among her people in the land of her kingdom, that the language has faded from her tongue. In it's place are the harsh sonorities of Jedhan, the delicate flourishes of Langue du Imperial, the rounded vowels and mongrel word origins of Festiano. They are languages she has learned to trade and barter and argue in, cuss and damn and sing drinking songs in. They are languages she has forged documents in, conned men from their money in, and in her days as a mercenary for the various squabbling Imperial factions, taken orders to kill in. 

But when she even answers simple questions in her own native tongue, she feels like a child again, who cannot remember simple words and makes simple grammatical mistakes. 

How can she lead a people who's language she cannot speak? Who'se culture is no longer her own? How can she convince them that she is one of their own? 

Her people are stubborn, violent, clannish. They've had to be, to survive in a land whipped by the grey sea and frozen by the wind. They are aggressive, they are reckless, they are undisciplined and sometimes as cold as the ice around them. 

But they are her people.

She's been away for far too long. In the dusty streets of Jedha and then the dirty, cramped cities of the Empire, switching sides to wherever the money was more and the ale was better. She's told herself she didn't care about her country, that it was not hers anymore 

Physically being here is different. Surrounded by the ancient silver forests and rune stones, the grass-covered mounds where her ancestors buried they leaders in ships laden with everything they'd need for the next life. The feel of the cold, wet mist and the smell of smoking fish and the sounds of the sagas she dimly remembers from childhood, the sounds of the shanties the men on longboats sing to stay in time as their oars slam against the water- all of it is home, home in a way she feels in her bones and hasn't felt for a very, very long time. 

It is her home, and she will fight for it, and cut it from the Empire's chains and pull it back to the light.

When she sees the figure on horseback, she has to rub at her eyes blearily and blame it on the ale. But the closer it gets, the more there's something familiar about the movements, the way it lifts a hand against the glare of the glinting northerly light. 

Behind him is a collection of dark speckles that initially look like ants but grow larger by the second. Soldiers. His soldiers. 

"I have come to find Jyn Lyrasdottir Erso," the figure calls, and she'd know the voice anywhere. Accented but sharply clean, quietly charismatic and commanding.

It's Cassian, but it's Cassian as she's never seen him before. 

The Festiano archer has bathed. Shaved. Cut his hair and parted it and combed it out properly. He's wearing a soldier's uniform, clean and pressed and ready for war, his quiver, as ever by his side. 

She should be happy to see him, but instead she's angry. He left her. 

"Thanks for the support." 

"They were never going to follow you."

"Fuck you." She says, because his leaving hurts more than it should, and right now she can't think of anything else to say. 

"But we will." 

He jesters at the riders behind him. An eclectic mix, men and women from a dozen nations, scruffy, worn down, powerful.

"We'd like to volunteer. Some of us, all of us, have done terrible things for our nations, to fight the Empire. Spies, saboteurs, assassins." 

And him, who is all three. 

"Everything I did, I did for my people. For Festia. And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget, I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in. A cause that was worth it. I couldn't face myself if I turned back now. None of us could." 

He turns his horse around and canters alongside his soldiers. "Today we have a chance to strike a chink in the Empire's armor and make a real difference. We take back Laemu, we cut off their supply chains and end their dominance of the North." 

He turns to the sailor, Bodhi. "Can you take us to the beaches of Skarif, on Laemu's outer coast?" 

Bodhi nods. "We can commandeer a vessel. It'll be a tight fit, but we should make it." 

Cassian comes closer to Jyn. She watches as he pulls out a small hunting knife and makes a cut on his hand. 

He holds his hand out blood falls upon the ground. A promise. To Laemu. To her. 

Their eyes meet and there is nothing she can say. A blood oath is a promise and an unbreakable one, a promise not of fealty but of kinship and of friends. A blood oath was not a promise to submit but to ride into battle together, no matter the odds. 

He came back for her. He swore herself to her.

("He's not a king," Leia had told her, "for Festia has always been under the rule of women. But he is a knight of the most rich and advanced kingdom in the world, and though it is known that his origins are neither grand or noble, he has a shrewd eye for business and has in his name more wealth in trade than some of these Northern kings put together." 

"What else is he, though?" Jyn had asked, because she had seen him do many another thing. She had seen him a crossbow primed and ready to take out hr father, and though he had abandoned the shot the image was not an easy one to forget.

"I think you already know.") 

And she does. She knows exactly who Cassian Andor is. If she were to believe in legends, she'd say the Norns had spun their life-strings from the same wool. 

And maybe they will cut the life-strings at the same time as well. 

His fighters watch, tensed, and he breaks the unspeakable tension of the moment, shooing them away. "Now go, go go! Grab anything not pegged down!" 

They disperse like flies from a fan and Jyn finally breathes. Takes the situation, the man before her, in. 

"I've never had anyone stick around when things went bad." And her words might not be epic or pretty or even strong enough to convey the depths of what she is feeling, but they are true. 

He jumps down from his horse and walks toward her, standing lower on the crest of the hill so that they are, for once, eye to eye. 

"Welcome home." 

**Author's Note:**

> It's in an imaginary fantasy world largely because having a Mexican character in medieval Europe felt distinctly like whitewashing, and also because I suck with date and wanted to do whatever I wanted to history. 
> 
> Spot the obscure Beowulf reference! 
> 
> I have 2 more parts planned that I will hopefully get around too, but suffice to say everything gets a bit more bloody. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
